St. Louis Pay Per Click

Archive for February, 2008

Many advertisers have seen a large increase in their AdWords advertising expenses due to a sudden decrease in quality scores on their keywords. Keywords that once saw low cost-per-clicks and great quality scores have suddenly paused because advertisers can’t afford to pay the minimum bid. With the quality score being one of the largest factors in the minimum bids and ranking of keywords in Google campaigns, many advertisers are wondering “Should I begin looking to a new pay per click network?” While advertising on other networks can help extend the reach of advertising messages and present lower-cost alternatives, abandoning your AdWords account is not necessarily the best answer. There are several factors to consider when trying to improve a keyword’s quality score. Consider the information below when evaluating your Google campaigns.

What Google Looks For

Quality score is a measure of the user experience. Google reviews both the advertiser’s campaigns and landing pages to ensure that they are both of high quality. In measuring quality (according to Google AdWords), Google looks at:

• The keyword’s historical click-through-rate (CTR) on Google
• The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group
• The quality of your landing page
• Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account
• Other relevance factors

All of these factors are used to determine the quality score for each keyword within a campaign’s ad group. With these factors in mind, here are some tips to help improve your campaign’s performance.

Relevance

This is one of the most important factors of the user’s experience, and one of the easiest for the advertiser to control. Make sure that the keywords within your ad groups are assigned to a specific landing page for the product or service you are offering. If you are advertising a specific shoe, you don’t send the visitor to the women’s shoes category page.

Ad Content

Make sure that your keywords are mentioned in your ad text. I know this sounds like a no-brainer, but many advertisers overlook this when creating their ads. Although a generic ad about the company is great for branding, it doesn’t necessarily your quality score. Assigning a few keywords to each ad makes this task easier.

Original Content

Just as it is important to keep site content updated for SEO purposes, advertisers should keep original content on their site for quality score purposes. Google places a great amount of importance on unique content on a site to help improve the user experience. Although this task may seem time consuming, there are some ways to accomplish this task without a large amount of additional effort.

• Blogs – This is a great way to continue to add fresh content to your site. Having an RSS feed on your blog on your site can create fresh content every time you post.
• Product reviews – Not only are these great for the user experience, this is also a good way to have your visitors provide content for your site.
• Testimonials – These are always great for conversion purposes and can add fresh content at the same time.

 Although there is no sure fire way to guarantee a “great” quality score, the methods discussed above can help you get one step closer. Google is constantly changing the way it judges sites within your network, which makes it hard to keep up with the latest criteria. Just continue to update your site and your content, which helps with SEO too as a bonus. 

Tracking conversions generated by pay per click advertising is getting much easier for strictly e-commerce websites. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter, and other pay per click advertising networks are providing tracking script solutions to advertisers. Advertisers can place source codes in each ads destination url to capture information on click referrers. They can also use tracking scripts provided by the networks themselves or analytics packages they are using, in order to capture the conversion amount that is generated by a click. These two solutions allow advertisers to get a better idea of where the visitors are coming from and what they are buying.

But how do you track orders that are placed outside of the website’s shopping cart?

Many e-commerce sites allow customers to purchase products both online and offline. We know that several measures can be taken to track online conversions, but what about order that are made over the phone? Luckily several methods have been uncovered to assist advertisers in closing the conversion gap. Some of the solutions that advertisers have available to them include:

800 Numbers

Some advertisers are purchasing batches of 800 numbers to assist in tracking phone conversions. The numbers are assigned to individual campaigns, ad groups, and even keywords to track success and overall performance.

Analytics Packages

In addition to purchasing 800 numbers for the company, several analytics programs have been created for this exact purpose. Web-based analytics providers, such as ClickPath, provide phone numbers for a company, both local and 800 numbers, which can be tracked within the analytics platform. These packages offer advertisers the ability to track conversions, conversion rates, and capture information on customers. This call-tracking method can alleviate the work advertisers would have to perform when using their own 800 numbers, making it less necessary to go through the phone bill.

Google AdWords Number Tracking Solution

Google’s AdWords program also makes it possible for advertisers to track their success. Advertisers can assign both local and 800 numbers to campaigns within the AdWords platform. The numbers are free and can be used to track print, radio, and television advertisements. Google provides a reporting function so advertisers can track the traffic that is generated by each number.

Tracking pay per click conversions and overall advertising success can be challenging, especially for companies that allow both online and offline purchases. Even with some of the best analytics programs, information can fall through the cracks. Yet, although there is no one solution that will allow each advertiser to accurately track their pay per click performance, a combination of solutions can help to make the reporting gap smaller.

Consumers spend a large portion of their days texting, emailing, and searching for web pages, directions, phone numbers, movie times, and many other things on their cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile devices. With consumers becoming more and more accustomed to using mobile devices for internet access and everyday communication, advertisers are finding success in mobile advertising.

How the Google Ads Work

Google AdWords’ mobile ads are text-based ads that appear on mobile websites or when users access the Google search network from a mobile device.  Mobile text-ads follow the same keyword bidding model as standard text-ads, with pricing for a given keyword based on demand for the use of that keyword as a trigger for display of an advertsement. The ad can send users to a mobile website or allow them to connect directly to your company’s phone through a call link that appears in the ad. This is a great way to target your potential customers and promote interaction.

Through the AdWords platform, you can select the carriers you want to display your ads. Ads can appear on all or a select number of mobile carriers, which can assist with targeting. The ads appear on both the search and content networks, increasing visibility of ads on mobile website, and the traffic potential.

For those wondering how to create a mobile website, AdWords helps you create your own ad page. The business pages are free to create and can provide users with basic information including your business address phone and fax numbers, email address and other information about your company and the products and services it provides. In short, you give potential customers your contact information at the exact moment they are able to contact you. Sounds like a great way to connect.

This post is purely informational. This is still a new form of advertising that can prove to be very useful. For more information check out Google AdWords site.